Not Quite Not White

by Sharmila Sen

  Going Native was my way of widening the space. Whiteface was my desperate attempt to stay on the right side of a rubbish heap that had followed me across the oceans.

  * * *

  • • •

  In 1982, I did not see a black man outside the U.S. consulate located on a street in Calcutta named after Ho Chi Minh. I saw a man whose skin was dark brown in color. His posture was straight. His uniform was spotless. He held his chin up high and looked beyond us into the distance. I do not know if he saw me. And if he did, I wonder what he thought of the Indian family that was trying to immigrate to the United States. Did he see us as Homo economicus? Did he think we would steal jobs from native-born Americans? Did he believe that the immigrant’s road to becoming American was on the backs of blacks? Did he know that of all the invidious nomenclatures we had invented for each other in Calcutta—Bengali, Non-Bengali, Hindu, Muslim, bhadralok, chhotolok, vegetarian, nonvegetarian, bangal, ghoti, touchable, untouchable—racial categories were noticeably absent?

  I did not see a black man outside the consulate that day. I saw a man with dark brown skin. The color of his skin was not unusual in Calcutta. There were many people walking around our streets with dark brown skin. I had relatives with dark brown skin. My maternal grandfather’s complexion was of a similar color. Some of my great-aunts were even darker. Even his facial features were not new to me. The subcontinent, after all, boasts of a wondrous variety of phenotypes. I have seen Indians with stick-straight hair and the tightest of curls, with thin lips and full ones, with long, sharp noses and wide, broad ones, with narrow and big round eyes that were brown, gray, and even green. So how did I know I had seen a black man outside the U.S. consulate? I had seen a man with skin the color of dark coffee. I had seen a person I presumed was American by virtue of the uniform he wore and position he occupied outside the consulate. That was all I saw.

  Until I saw him again in my mind’s eye after I landed in America. I knew then that he was a black man. And in order to see that he was black, I had to perceive the white man—the man who needs no racial adjective, no additional color signifier, no special labels or markings—who forms the backdrop against which a black man is always seen. That second way of seeing was grounded on my tacit understanding of him as Not White. My American education trained me to never name whiteness when I spoke in English. At home, when I spoke in Bengali with my parents, or in Hindi with my husband, we used words such as shaheb or gora. It was only when I had three children with whom I spoke in English at home did I reconsider naming whiteness. The language I used to name whiteness mattered. Language is no empty vessel. It carries stories, events, emotions from times past. Language always overdelivers. It outstrips its promise. Blanc. Blank. Blanquito. Caucasian. Farang. Firang. Gora. Sahib. Shaheb. White. Wit. These words might sometimes point us to the same man standing across the street from us. But they rarely point to the same qualities in the man and the same implicit hopes and fears within the speaker who is gesturing toward the man.

  My relationship with English has evolved during the course of the three decades I have spent in the United States. English will always be my third language. It began as the language of school, and flowered into the language of my intellect, while it continued to keep a respectful distance from the language of my emotion. At four, I managed to name a fruit in English and gained entry into an English-medium school. At eleven, I was able to speak English well enough to be interviewed by an employee at the American consulate in Calcutta. At thirteen, I delivered the valedictory speech at the Peabody School in Cambridge. At seventeen, I was admitted to Harvard College with presumably enough fluency in English that no one was concerned about my ability to write papers or follow lectures. At twenty-four, Yale admitted me into the doctoral program in English literature. At twenty-eight, Harvard hired me as an assistant professor of English. What does it mean to be a nonnative speaker of English? What does it mean to speak a language as one’s third language?

  My relationship with English resembles the relationship one has with another human being over the course of a lifetime. Strangers can become intimate friends. Friends can become next of kin. As a child, I did not speak English at home or on the playground. I acquired the language in a school where neither the teachers nor the students spoke English as their first language. I was fluent in English when I was in high school and college. I worried about speaking with the right accent and knowing the correct slang because I did not wish to stand apart as a new immigrant.

  What I lacked was a sense of deep intimacy with English. The kind of intimacy with a language that can be found in the whispered lullabies a mother sings to her child at night, that we associate with the nonsense words and silly rhymes used to amuse babies. Miss Solomon taught me how to write English in a pretty cursive hand. American public schools taught me how to forge lifelong friendships in English. American private universities gave me an education in the history, politics, and aesthetics of the English language, from the drunken cowherd Caedmon to Stephen Dedalus’s moocow. Every one of these stages deepened my friendship with the language beyond Lord Macaulay’s wildest dreams. Yet, other languages—Indian languages—remained the language of my secret heart. Until my children were born.

  On official forms I might still be counted as a nonnative speaker of English. I have not abandoned the languages I learned before English. I do not feel estranged from them. I still speak with my parents and my natal family in Bengali. I read magazines and novels in Bengali. I leap at the chance to use my mother tongue when I meet someone from my part of the subcontinent. I enjoy Hindi movies and film songs. I listen almost exclusively to Hindi songs when I am alone in the car. My husband and I switch to Hindi when we wish for a bit of privacy in America. Or when we need quick shorthand for a concept we both grasp better in Hindi. Yet, how can I call English a stranger when it is the sole language with which I love, scold, soothe, and sustain my children? My three children made English the language of my emotions. For them, I had to learn to say new things in English at home, things I had previously said in other languages. For them I had to learn to name whiteness. My children—unable to pass as white because of their complexion, unwilling to pass as white because they belong to a more confident second generation of the immigration story—are of color.

  I learned to name whiteness for their sake so that the white officer in front of the consulate door—the man I saw as a sahib—did not go unnamed while the other men were made extraordinarily visible with an array of adjectives. A person of color. An Asian man. A Hispanic man. An Indian man. A South Asian man. A black man. A brown man. A yellow man. Having been a young immigrant, I already knew that real power lies in being so dominant that you need not be named. The normal needs no name, no special qualifier. In the United States, there is no need to name the male, the white, the Protestant because these are attributes of the normative. And when we who are not male, white, or Protestant choose to name these things, we risk sounding like people with grievances—angry, shrill, dangerous. We do not need to call the first forty-three presidents of the United States our white presidents or our male presidents or our Christian presidents because that is exactly what all presidents are supposed to be—white, male, Christian. Only divergences need to be pointed out. A Catholic president. A Jewish president. A black president. A female president. They are a break from the norm. They require the armature of adjectives.

  As a college teacher who spent many years lecturing on writings by people from the Caribbean islands, Africa, and the Indian subcontinent, I knew that my students—a diverse group of young people of different races and nationalities—rarely flinched when I named color. We read books by black authors and brown authors. Black, brown, yellow, orange, red, purple, pink, green. I could name every color except white. If I spoke of white ideas, white authors, white literature, white music, white aesthetics, white politics, or white people, then suddenly the atmosphere in the classroom changed. Naming whiteness
introduced a note of perceived grievance in my voice. When a person who is Not White names whiteness, ordinary talk turns into race talk. Black, brown, yellow—when we use these colors as descriptors of people, of ideas, of culture we are not shining our light on something that is kept hidden in plain sight. These colors—the people associated with these colors and their actions—are always under scrutiny, in a perpetual state of being vetted.

  American life is not unique in this instance. I can find similar patterns in the society in which I was born. In India, dalits, people who are considered untouchable by upper-caste Hindus, are allowed a certain amount of freedom these days by those who consider themselves progressive. Thus, we can talk of dalit authors and dalit leaders. If, however, an author or a political leader is named as Brahmin, then accusations of fomenting caste warfare rear their heads. The upper-caste is the norm. The lower-caste untouchable exists as departure from, and as inferior to, the norm. Naming the norm robs it of its magic. The equal distribution of adjectives—black and white, man and woman, upper caste and lower caste, rich and poor, Protestant and Catholic—is a potent way of robbing the normative of its invisibility cloak.

  I do not want my daughter or my sons to be people of color. I want more for them. I want them to know that they are Not White. I want them to know that their mother, despite her light complexion and despite her semisuccessful attempts at passing when she was younger, is Not White. I want them to know that such a statement, an open declaration of Not Whiteness, once cost people their lives and livelihoods. Today, the same declaration is a rejection of the unspoken code of twenty-first-century American society that hides the derision inherent in “colored people” by rearranging the words into a celebratory “people of color.” Not Whiteness dares to name whiteness. It refuses to fly the flag of color while allowing the dominant culture to retain its powerful invisibility. People of Color sings the sweet song of solidarity. It is an affirmation. Not White grunts with belligerence. It is angry. It is a negation. Why would anyone willingly choose a negation over an affirmation for themselves and their children?

  The arguments against the belligerence and politics inherent in Not Whiteness are not unfamiliar. Political blackness is no longer fashionable on either side of the Atlantic. The opponents of political blackness argue that Not White erases the differences among people of color; Not White is a disempowering label that makes whiteness the racial equivalent of Greenwich Mean Time; Not White erases the specificity of my Indian heritage, of my exact provenance from one very particular segment of Bengali society. The specifics are important for minorities, especially for second- or third-generation immigrants. Removed from the homeland of their ancestors, my native-born children might one day search for something concrete—the language, the rituals, the music, the dance, the folklore, the vestments of their grandparents. The belligerent grunt that is Not White could sweep those half-forgotten specifics even further away from their grasp.

  As a first-generation American I share few of the second and third generations’ anxieties. I have forgotten nothing. I still know the old languages. I know how to shape the letters of my mother tongue. I know what to feed a baby during the ceremony of the first solid food. I have not forgotten the stories of the tuntuni bird. I have no anxiety of Indianness. Perhaps this is why I feel less of a need to prove my Indianness. I also know that negation carries with it a powerful note of resistance: I am not a monotheist. I am not Christian. I am not European. I am Not White.

  I could tell my children that I am a polytheist, a Hindu, an Asian, a person of color. I disown none of these four labels. Yet, I am not satisfied leaving the dominant culture as an unnamed force that shapes the murky meaning of these labels. I grew up worshipping many gods. But no card-carrying polytheist ever calls herself a polytheist. Only a monotheist—someone who believes that one god is superior to many—could invent the idea of polytheism. People have worshipped Shiva for thousands of years in the Indian subcontinent. But Europeans decided to give the name of religion to a complex way of living an ethical life. Asian was a geographic term when I lived in Asia. In the United States, I learned that Asian is a racial category. No one can call themselves a person of color without implicitly seeing their color against a backdrop of whiteness.

  For all these reasons and more, I chose Not White. A grunt. A negation. A refusal. A belligerence.

  * * *

  • • •

  I tried to be the good immigrant by assimilating as swiftly as I could when I arrived in the United States as a young girl. I tried to be a grateful immigrant by learning to talk, dress, cook, eat, drink, dance, and even think like an American. Following the logic of meritocracy, I believed that my success was earned by merit. And my merit was my virtue. I was entrepreneurial. I fashioned myself to increase my chances of finding success. I wore whiteface. And just when my colleagues and friends simply “forgot” I was Not White—an unexpected tide of anger welled up inside me. Just when I thought I had succeeded in following the rules of my own DIY whiteface manual, I found myself angry and overwhelmed by sadness.

  The angrier I felt, the more I smiled, told jokes, made others laugh so that they would not perceive me as a problem. I took care not to speak Bengali in front of others outside my family. I did not ask for a day off from work when Holi or Durga puja or Diwali rolled around. I participated in Christmas festivities with great enthusiasm. In truth, I enjoyed wrapping Christmas presents, surprising colleagues with the perfect Secret Santa gifts, and drinking eggnog. I enjoyed the sharp, clean scent of pine when I stood in the snow, selling Christmas trees for our children’s school fund-raisers. Having lost all the festivals of my youth I was eager to mark the seasons in any way possible—Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Easter. There is comfort in rituals that mark the rhythm of each season. And it was also my way of blending into the dominant culture.

  I wished to blend into whiteness because I knew how the poor, the foreign, the underclass are only too visible. I knew how the dominant class averts its gaze and continues to surveil those who are marked out as different, weak, and dangerous. As a young girl in India, I was trained not to see the things that terrified us—Prakash, the basti, the beggars on the streets, the refugees on railway platforms. Our self-inflicted blindness was less a mark of our callousness, and more a sign of our terror. The distance between me and the girls who begged on the streets was so fragile. We did not truly see the maids, cleaners, drivers, and doormen. We did things when our maids were in the room, or when a driver was in the car, that no human normally does in front of another. The master often does not see the slave; the mistress of the house does not see her maid; and I did not see the women who squatted in our kitchen and washed dirty dishes. We did not really see them because they were not quite human to us. So we felt free to carry on as if no one was around.

  Our blindness was also an indicator of the outsize importance of the people we chose not see. In Calcutta, Ma and Baba constantly fretted about thieves, kidnappers, and pickpockets. We demonized everyone who came out of that unseen place behind the garbage heap. Today I realize that my blindness was to the particularity of the slum dwellers and beggars I saw all around me. I did not see individual human beings. Instead, I saw supersized generalizations. I saw types—bastibashi, chhotolok, chamar, chheledhora, chor, dakat, jhi-chakor. These were our words for slum dwellers, lower classes, untouchables, kidnappers, thieves, robbers, servants. Each of these words in Bengali exceeds its dictionary definitions. They are not mere nouns but diffuse, scary ideas used to make a middle-class child obey her elders, ace her exams, and never let go of an adult’s hand in a crowd. These words were our own Bengali version of the quintessential American phrase my children have been taught by well-meanings teachers—stranger danger.

  Strangers pose danger. I knew that in Calcutta long before I learned this cute English phrase. They can cheat us, rob us, steal us, maim us, and even slit our throats while we sleep in our
beds at night. We locked and bolted every door and window at night when we went to sleep. A watchman patrolled Dover Lane and the familiar sound of his bamboo stick hitting the pavement—thak, thak, thak—lulled me to sleep. Strangers were dangerous because they could transform us into people like them. We had to remain alert and not look too closely into their eyes.

  In New Haven, I was once warned by a fellow student that I had to be careful when walking around town. “Sometimes,” this white classmate told me, “you turn a corner and realize you are the only white person walking on the street. Be careful.” An awkward pause followed. I walked back to my apartment, muttering to myself about all the things I could have said in response. “I always forget you are Indian,” a high school friend told me while we were walking around Harvard Square. She meant it as a compliment. She meant I was not a strange foreigner. That made me even sadder. “But I see you as white,” a dear friend confided to me during a work trip to India. We were sitting together on the rooftop of a small house in a Rajasthani village. Perhaps my friend intended to convey that she perceived no difference between us. Perhaps she did not want to see us as separate. In America, separateness is always accompanied by the specter of inequality. Perhaps she wanted to inch away from an America where extraordinary words such as mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, quintroon, terceron, hexadecaroon, mustee, and mustefino were once part of ordinary English. I, who had worked for so long to hide my difference, felt suffocated by the embrace of sameness. Sitting atop an impoverished home in India, looking at the stray dogs, scrawny cows, and mud-caked water buffaloes, with the dusty Aravalli Hills undulating in the distance, I no longer yearned to be seen as white, no matter how pale my skin appeared. I did not wish to leave behind my fellow Indians—even the ones with whom I had few words or foods or gods in common—in their poorly constructed homes, surrounded by heaps of trash and open drains, and disappear into whiteness.